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Paul Krugman in Imperial Fantasy Land
MediaIn the aftermath of Soleimani’s assassination, Krugman rushed to assure his readers that Trump’s bullying violence represented a fundamental break with American history. While America once had “a special leadership position, one that sometimes involved playing a role in reshaping other countries’ political systems,” he argued, Trump “has never shown any sign of understanding why America used to be special.”
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Trump’s Iran ‘Punching Bag’: US Provocations to Continue
USA PoliticsTrump’s assassination of Iran’s general and senior diplomat, Qassim Suleimani, was a clear provocation by the United States, designed to produce an escalated military response by Iran. That did not happen. Iran did not take the bait. It responded minimally and appears to have done so in a way to avoid US deaths or even major US asset destruction. If Iran had escalated militarily, which it was capable of doing, it would have fallen into Trump’s trap.
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Trump’s ‘déjà vu’ wartime playbook
USA PoliticsHistory repeats itself, as they say. But in the age of American empire, not just twice, or even three times, but with disturbing regularity. The past half century shows two things about how America goes to war: First, it creates a provocation based on a lie. Second, it then makes its target adversary an ‘offer they can only refuse’, as the final justification for US military action once the adversary rejects the unacceptable offer.
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War With Iran
USA PoliticsThe assassination by the United States of General Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, near Baghdad’s airport will ignite widespread retaliatory attacks against U.S. targets from Shiites, who form the majority in Iraq. It will activate Iranian-backed militias and insurgents in Lebanon and Syria and throughout the Middle East. The consequences are ominous.
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The Battle for Equality
USA Politics“The battle for equality is still pending.” Indeed, Radical claims to equality during the Civil War era helped destroy the chattel bondage of Sumner’s reference and mobilized legions of Americans toward economic reform. But the enduring lesson of those movements is that the political equality which Sumner pursued has proven wholly inadequate in combating material inequality, much less challenging the capitalist system. The battle for socialism—and a system “beyond equality”—is still pending.
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Leaked OPCW document sheds light on disinformation surrounding Syrian civil war
USA PoliticsThe disinformation surrounding the Syrian civil war appears to have been lifted from the Iraq/Afghanistan playbook. It is all the more disgraceful that the media that participated in selling those wars (now recognized as catastrophic failures) is engaging in the same manipulative tactics to encourage ongoing suffering and destabalization in Syria. Exposing the truth of the conflict demonstrates how this war lines up, yet again, with a long pattern of regime change interventionism in the Middle East.
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Hope Lies in the Streets
Social MovementsThe loss of credibility of the reigning ideology has led the ruling elites to forge an alliance with right-wing, neofascist demagogues. These demagogues accelerate the pillage. They accelerate the hatred, racism and violence that act as a diversion. And they accelerate the social unrest that becomes the excuse for the imposition of tyranny. Hope lies in the streets. Millions of people in Hong Kong, India, Chile, France, Iran, Iraq and Lebanon understand. It is time to join them.
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As Germany greenlights Huawei, US has lost its 5G war
GlobalizationOn Monday, the news broke that Germany would not be excluding Huawei from participating in its fifth-generation (5G) internet networks. With the country’s new “security catalog” being released, setting out rules and guidelines to ensure safety in the building of the network, no formal bans or exclusions of individual vendor companies were specified, giving the Shenzhen telecommunications firm the green light.
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The 2019 National Convention of the Democratic Socialists of America
USA PoliticsOver the past two years, DSA has doubled its membership from 25,000 to 40,000, and that expansion translated into an increase in the number of delegates to the convention, from 700 to 1,000. The election of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2018 and Rashida Tlaib in 2019, both members of the DSA, to the House of Representatives helped spur the organization’s growth. Many of the delegates were new members attending their first convention.
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The Untold Story of the Trump-Ukraine Scandal: The Routine Corruption of US Foreign Policy
USA PoliticsWhat’s not being talked about in the mainstream is the context of this story, which shows that Biden should indeed be investigated in both Ukraine and in the United States. We know from the leaked 2014 telephone conversation between Victoria Nuland, then assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, and Geoffrey Pyatt, then U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, that Biden played a role in “midwifing” the U.S.-backed overthrow of an elected Ukrainian government.
